The Flow Estimates of Australia Labour Force Hours Worked and Seasonal Adjustment

• Activity Number: 124
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Business and Economic Statistics Section
• Author(s): Xichuan Mark Zhang*+ and Noel Hansen
• Companies: Australian Bureau of Statistics and Australian Bureau of Statistics
• Keywords: time series ; seasonal adjustment ; holiday effect ; ARIMA ; benchmarking ; reconciliation

Abstract

The Australia Labour Force Survey produces estimates of hours worked by Australian employed persons during just one week of the reference month or quarter. There is a strong user demand for estimates of hours worked during entire years and seasonally adjusted time series estimates of hours worked during entire months or quarters for labour productivity measures. Users are also interested in these hours worked estimates for detailed categories including industry, sex and type of employment. In this paper, we'll present how the holiday effects are accounted for and a range of simple 'level correcting' methodologies were combined to produce a suite of synthetic flow estimates of hours worked for varying durations and categories. We'll explore some of the problems encountered and how they influenced the methodologies chosen to be applied to each time series.